NGS

Who Is This?

I'm a girl. I live in Wisconsin with my husband. We have a cat named Zelda, a houseplant named Lindsey, an herb garden on our balcony that is always *thisclose* to being nothing more than soil, and a habit of watching Criminal Minds until way past an appropriate bedtime. I'm a grad school flunkie with leftover angsty feelings from that time in my life. I can't parallel park or ride my bike with no hands. I can teach systems of equations, though, so I feel like I've gotten a fair shake in life.

Photo Project

My best friend and I take pictures every day. Every day of the month has a different theme. Enjoy!

Past Musings

Thursday, June 20, 2013

My cat is annoyingly smart. She gets bored easily, so we have a million gazillion toys for her. I rotate them every three or four days and we have so many toys that my general rotations are a few weeks long. She just turned two earlier this month, so she's not a kitty anymore (sob), but she is still quite active and playful.

Toys My Cat Loves:

1) Petlinks System Rope Around Hanging Catnip Cat Scratcher - I don't want you to think she actually cares about the scratcher part. We have it hanging on a door knob in a room where we frequently go without her (our office) and she will occasionally scratch it when she wants attention and knows we're in there, but she's obsessed with that ball that is hanging down from it. The ball clips on and is really easy for her to take off (she figured it out in about 5 seconds) and the feathers of the ball are long gone, but you can find her regularly carrying around the soft ball in her mouth. It's adorable.

2) Finger traps - She throws them up in the air like she just don't care. We buy them in bulk at our local pet store and there are probably a few dozen underneath the washer, dryer, refrigerator, and stove.

3) Thick-walled drinking straws (like these color changing straws made for Aladdin tumblers that used to be sold at Target, but apparently aren't anymore, so Zelda is never getting any new ones) - She's a mouthy one, our kitty. She bites and bites and bites some more. Our vet told her to get some straws when she was teething, but she STILL plays with them. She likes it best when we hide them under the rug or the Wii or a blanket, but she will regularly just chew them. Like you do.

We tried just regular drinking straws at first, but they are so thin, she would chew through them in 15 seconds and then start to eat them. Since cats ingesting plastic is frowned upon, we hit upon these and she has two or three with teeth marks all over them, but they have proven sturdy for over a year at this point.

4) Cat dancer - This is little more than some cardboard tubes wrapped around a wire, but you better believe that my cat will be distracted from whatever naughtiness she is up to as soon as we take it out of the closet.

5) Faux Fur Mice with Feathers - They sell these at the register of our local pet shop for less than a dollar a piece. Zelda is obsessed with them. For a long time, I thought it meant she liked feathers a lot, but that is not the case. She will keep playing with them long after the feathers have disappeared (much like the ball from the scratching post in item one). I think it's because they are super light and, as my gruesome husband likes to point out, have realistic feeling skeletal structures.

Toys My Cat Will Roll Her Eyes at You for Buying and Will Play with One Time to Humor You and Never Touch Again:

1) Any fishing pole type thing - I'm not going to tell you how many poles with feathers/fish/dangling objects we have purchased. She will play with them ONCE, maybe even excitedly play with them, doing awesome somersaults in the air, and then ignore them when you take them out to distract her from scratching on the couch.

2) The scratching post everyone says your cat will love - We got the SmartCat Ultimate Scratching Post because all the people told us to from the vet to the Interwebs to the random guy at Petco. I think she's used it twice.

3) All the things Amazon suggests:
The Smart Cat Peek a Prize Box (with replacement toys) - My cat don't give a shit about your box with holes. That's not hard enough for her, although she has played with one of the replacement toys, the white fuzzy monster thing that makes a clicking noise, a few times (it's the toy next to the grey cat in the photo).

The Bergan Turbo Scratcher Toy - My cat idly poked at the ball a couple of times. We tried to show her how to play with it. She humored us and hit the ball hard a couple of times to show us she knew how to use it, and then never touched it again. She'll scratch the cardboard occasionally, but only when we aren't looking.

The Pet Qwerks Kitty Babble Ball - My cat knows that isn't another cat babbling at her. It served only to terrify the humans when one of them accidentally stepped on it in the middle of the night.

The Play -n- Squeak Mouse Hunter. She did play with this once, quite enthusiastically. But whenever it's come back into the rotation after that first intense love, it has never moved from where we "hide" it.

4) Pet Stages Quiet Balls - This is heartbreaking to me. When we first got Z, these were some of the very first toys we purchased for her. She played with them All. The. Damn. Time. I remember Baby Zelda carrying one around by the tag, tail high in the air, looking so proud of herself. *sigh* These days she absolutely ignores them. BB and I try to get her interest in them, but she just doesn't buy it anymore. She's growing up, my baby kitty.

5) Boxes - It was only nine months ago that I was bragging about how my kitty loved to be in boxes. She does still hang out in her kennel a lot, but she doesn't play with boxes anymore. When we get a new box, she sniffs it, maybe jumps in it once to check it out, and then ignores it. It's a sad, sad day.

Gratuitious Pictures of My Kitty:

I hate it when the temperature gets about 75. I will lay here and glare at you until you turn on the AC for my comfort, human companion.

4 comments:

That sounds like a lot of work to keep a cat entertained! I guess I was lucky when I had mine that he mostly loved to just snuggled. Then again, I took him in when he was already older. I do remember one of the things he loved was chasing after a red laser light that we'd flash around.

I remember once getting all excited to buy Abby a cat hammock. A CAT HAMMOCK. She never sat in it once. Bah.

Sunny loves plastic rings. She comes to meow at me while I'm making dinner, and that's my cue to slide them across the hardwood floor to her, where she uses her paws to defend them like a hockey goalie. She also became obsessed with a paper towel we had on the floor once (to put our wet shoes on while we were washing our rug). We have video of her sitting on it, then sprinting around the kitchen like a lunatic before returning to the paper towel like it was some sort of home base or something.

Sounds like Zelda's one smart cookie. It's kind of a hit-and-miss with pet toys, isn't it? Something that looks promising might not even be appealing to them at all. It's best to figure out first which toys your pet likes before buying up in bulk.